A Medicated Empire : : The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan / / Timothy M. Yang.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Yang, Timothy M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (354 p.) :; 25 b&w halftones, 3 b&w line drawings

In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empire, and the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good, Yang shows how the industry promoted a hygienic, middle-class culture that was part of Japan's national development and imperial expansion. Yang makes clear that the company's fortunes had less to do with scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations than with Japan's web of social, political, and economic relations. He lays bare Hoshi's business strategies and its connections with politicians and bureaucrats, and he describes how public health authorities dismissed many of its products as placebos at best and poisons at worst. Hoshi, like other pharmaceutical companies of the time, depended on resources and markets opened up, often violently, through colonization. Combining global histories of business, medicine, and imperialism, A Medicated Empire shows how the development of the pharmaceutical industry simultaneously supported and subverted regimes of public health at home and abroad.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note to the Reader -- Introduction -- Part I. The Drug Industry, Entrepreneurship, and the State -- 1. A Strategic Industry -- 2. The Supposed Self-Made Man and His Company -- Part II. Marketing Medicines and Medicinal Infrastructures -- 3. Marketing a Culture of Self-Medication -- 4. Medicinal Infrastructures and Medical Missionaries -- Part III. The Opium Empire -- 5. The Scandal of Opium (and the Colonial Exception) -- 6. Things Fall Apart -- Part IV. Science, Self-Sufficiency, and Wartime Mobilization -- 7. Selling the Science of Quinine Self-Sufficiency -- 8. War and Drugs -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Selected Titles